


The Physician

by smokingbomber



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ancient History, Background Relationships, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Saturn is a perkygoth and no one can tell me otherwise, Silver Millennium Era, Survival Horror, What-If, Worldbuilding, no betas we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-04-23 20:57:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19158838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smokingbomber/pseuds/smokingbomber
Summary: What if the healer... healed? This story is about Prince Endymion and the Outer Senshi, people who are very surprised they're alive.





	1. The Moon

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warning:** This chapter contains battlefield gore/horror.

It was dark and cold, and the air was too dry, too thin. Now and then a solitary snowflake hit his skin, not cold at all-- and his chest hurt terribly, and he felt sticky and wrong. Something soft, cold, and heavy lay atop him, and with rather more effort and pain than it should have taken, he managed to shove it off. There. He could breathe.

Endymion rolled to one side, away from the cold weight he'd just pushed off of himself, and lifted his hand to heal whatever wound was making his chest hurt. The warm and golden glow of his power lit his hand, and he glanced in front of him reflexively. He immediately wished he hadn't: there was sunny Jadeite, clouded blue eyes empty and glassy, staring into eternity. Dried blood coated his neck and uniform, almost managing to hide the ragged pale flesh of his sliced-open throat, and it pooled, congealing, on the ground beneath him. 

He felt like retching, but reached forward with his glowing hand anyway, automatically acting as if there were any hope. He knew there wasn't, but he didn't want to go insane, and going through the motions would help--

\--his heart reached out for its beacons, and found them all dark.

( _he didn't want to go insane,_ it was close and clawing at his edges-- any one of his most precious people would have helped him, but they weren't there, they were probably--)

He closed his eyes. No. Focus. He ghosted his fingertips gently across Jadeite's cold forehead, looking with his empathy, with his connection to the blond man, because he knew there'd be no pulse. 

Nothing. Jadeite was as much clay as his sculptures, now. 

(All of them-- all the connections-- all dark. He couldn't remember how he got to this hellish cold place; he'd been fighting with his guardians, he knew that much. And there had been an emergency, he knew-- had his last words to them been spoken in anger?)

Holding his breath to keep from throwing up, Endymion moved his hand down to close Jadeite's eyes, then withdrew, putting his hand to his chest again. He looked at his wound as he healed it, and realized that it had already been healing-- that it had been deep-- no, it had been fatal. All at once, he remembered, and his heart fluttered and skipped alarmingly; his breath hitched. 

This wasn't snow falling, it was ash. The air was thin because they were on the Moon, and the dome had cracked in the attack, everyone had heard it like an echoing thunderclap that drove spikes into ears and hearts alike. It was cold because the life support was failing; it was all powered by magic, by the magic of Serenity's mother. If she no longer maintained it, then-- what would happen? Did the Queen live, her crystal only damaged? Was there _anything_ left? Where was Serenity? Surely she must have gotten to safety, her guardians must have shuffled her away--

He remembered Beryl, transformed into a demoness, driving a sword through his chest when he couldn't dash it aside or parry it. He remembered why he couldn't dodge, either, and realized with a sick, dead feeling in the pit of his stomach...  
...just what he must have shoved off of his chest. Cold, soft, heavy-- but not so very heavy-- and feeling uncomfortably like a body. His fingertips had been too numb with cold to take in the texture of whatever cloth the weight had been tangled in.  
Endymion slowly picked himself up and turned, heart in his mouth.

Serenity, like a porcelain doll, snow white skin and gown and silver hair caked dark with her own blood and his, mingled. With an absurdly insulting breeze from the air escaping the dome, a few strands of bright silver lifted and settled again, and her face was composed, streaked with salt silver tears. Her eyes were closed already; she might have been sleeping but for the blood and stillness. 

She lay where she'd fallen when he'd pushed her off of him, and Endymion's stomach turned, and he couldn't look away, he shouldn't, he hadn't saved her after all, and he-- he let himself look away. 

That was a mistake, too. Venus and Kunzite both lay dead beyond her, swords buried in each other, metal turned to stone; Jupiter sprawled broken just past them, Nephrite's body beneath her, his hands turned to burnt-tipped claws reaching toward nothing-- who knew where beautiful Zoisite was, where Mars and Mercury had fallen-- and all around, the dead waited to be seen, remembered. Corpses of the people he knew and loved most, bodies of the unprepared subjects of the Silver Millennium; they danced motionlessly with the remains of countless denizens of Earth. It was a still and silent dance, as stately as it was ignominious, and they shared in the death that took them all equally, no matter their potential lifespans.

The Crown Prince of Earth looked up to the sky; it had to be better than looking at this, all this which took pieces of him away with every horror. His beacons were all dark, their hearts stopped and their minds silent, their souls fled-- elsewhere.

The clouds of smoke choking the dome shifted, revealing what was beyond. There was a planet-- could it be his? His, so precious and full of life, so beautiful, that should be like a blue marble in the sky? The planet he saw was grey and black and brown, spotted with immense fires, smoke and pyroclastic dust flooding the atmosphere and and obscuring cities and scorched countryside and choked oceans. It couldn't be Earth, but this was the Moon, and the twinkling stars through the escaping atmosphere were the right ones--

Everyone was dead. His planet was dead. The Moon was dead. 

But he, Endymion, by now undoubtedly King of a burning husk choked with ash and death, was alive and alone. He'd died-- he knew he'd died. Hadn't he? Hadn't he felt his life trickle away as his heart tried to beat around the blade buried within it? Hadn't he seen Jadeite die beside him, eyes cleared for the first time in days, panicked and then resolved--? Hadn't he heard Serenity screaming his name behind him, as if at a great distance? Wouldn't she have _known?_

He didn't feel anything. It was too much. He should close all their eyes, he should find them all in this-- _this,_ he should-- but he can't bury them all, he can't bury all the other people that this-- this thing that was too big, it was all too big, it was--

He shut that part of himself down. He couldn't do anything for anyone here. The entire Moon would have to serve as a tomb, a memorial bright and cold and lifeless in the sky. They'd see it when the ash cleared.

They? There was nothing left here, but-- there might yet be someone alive on Earth, Elysion might be safe, he'd _sealed_ it, and after all-- there was something left to heal him, wasn't there? Would he be alive if Earth were entirely dead? There had to be someone, _something_ \-- and if there was, then he had an obligation. He had a duty to his people, to what was left of his planet, even if he had nothing else left in the universe.

As he turned to leave, to go see if there was anything left functioning that could bring him back to Earth, he saw a bright glow suddenly blooming in the dark, blue-white like Mercury's ice, or like the burn of the tiny glittering satellites he'd once seen launched from the Moon while he hid with Serenity, their eyes wide with wonder together. (Don't think of her body behind you. Don't. Don't think.) 

Endymion ran toward the light.

 

\-----

 

The city around him was fallen, caved in; the walks were pitted and cratered. It was unfamiliar and difficult to run in, even without everything else there was to trip over. After the first time Endymion slipped on something awful and nearly cracked his head open on broken masonry, he gave in and let his power light his hands again, held in reserve. It meant he had to see, but it meant he could see where he was going. It wasn't like the Moon let him read it the way his home ground did.

He was almost to the prayer tower before he realized he wasn't in the capital city.

Endymion had been running through the palace. Had started in the courtyard and been running through the *palace*-- it wasn't like him to get so turned around, but without the stars to guide him easily, and without the landmarks-- without *ceilings*, he couldn't tell where he was at all. He stopped being able to think, to process anything at all.

He came back to himself with a jolt at the abrupt explosion only just ahead of him, and had apparently kept running: he was at the edge of the circle that had been the mosaic floor of the tower, and the tower was just *gone*. There was the crystal that resonated with the Queen's own, and it was so much smaller-- immense pieces of it had fallen off, some of them shattered. 

Now, though, just beyond it, some kind of device was falling apart, having just launched two projectiles up through the dome. It would shatter it the rest of the way, and even if Endymion didn't die (could he die?) it would be a hellish existence with no air and no warmth, keeping company with only the dead he'd carry with him regardless.

He saw a small girl in a Senshi uniform bending down, and stepped around the remains of the prayer tower's crystal, starting to reach out--

\--and he saw what the girl was doing. She was closing her Queen's eyes.

The immortal, unconquerable goddess of the Moon, the soul that kept this Silver Millennium together and alive, lay dead-- as composed in death as her daughter, and as streaked with the evidence of grief.

Endymion's breath caught. He didn't think anything else could shock him that day, could flatten him, could end his hope any more thoroughly than the visions of his Serenity and his Shitennou and the Senshi laying dead around him, than the brief spectacle in the sky of the burning planet he called his own-- but this goddess-Queen, unshakeable and mysterious and kind, the mother of the most giving and loving creature in the universe... her death really was the end.

That's what the strange Senshi's eyes told him as she turned to face him. 

"But I'm here," he said, choking on the words. He knew he didn't want to be. He knew it would be awful, it would be empty, it would be--

"I'm here and there's a purpose. There are people, still. There are people left to save. My people. It's not all dead."

His people? He didn't know them. He thought he knew them and they turned on him even as they turned on the Moon. Even his best beloved Knights, his guardians, whom he had loved since he was small and growing up with them--

"They're alive and they're *mine*," he said, his voice cracking and soaring, proving him still the teenager he'd tried so hard not to be, there at the last.

"I have been summoned," the young girl finally said, her voice soft and sweet and apologetic. She reached to touch his hand, still glowing, but paused before she did, and met his eyes again. "I am Saturn, the Senshi of Destruction; I am called to lower the Glaive and destroy that which no longer functions."

"Please," said the too-young King in desperation, almost begging, "please give me a chance. It's still alive. My planet is still alive. Everyone I know-- everyone I love-- but *my planet* is still here." And then it *was* begging. "Please let me *try*."

Sailor Saturn stopped him before he took his knee in front of her, and she offered him a strange little smile, touching his hand at last. "I have not yet raised the Glaive. You asked... with very good timing. Endymion, you of all people-- you have a chance. It is slim, and should you fail, I will fulfill my purpose and destroy everything. But you have a chance. Are you certain you do not wish to join your loved ones? It will be a long wait, if you ever see them again."

"I have a duty," said Endymion, hands shaking.

"So be it."

The last thing he heard was the sky finally exploding; the last thing he saw was a purple so dark it was almost black, engulfing him and shielding him from space, and finally, from consciousness. The last thing he thought...

*How very different this shadow shield is from Kunzite's.*


	2. Home

****

###  **home**

Endymion woke up disoriented, outside the palace in the capital city of the Golden Kingdom of Earth, jacket sticking to him beneath his pierced breastplate. He was lying on broken ground in the shadow of a toppled column, and the air was cold and the sky was dark, and orange light danced and flickered. Before he remembered not to, he automatically checked to see where his Shitennou were, and again found his connections to them broken, their hearts out of reach.

He lay there for a moment, thoughts racing in a chaotic riot of overlapping fragments and hands trembling, and then deliberately stopped trying to process anything bigger than getting up and taking stock of his immediate area. With one hand on the base of the broken pillar, sunken partway into the ground, he hauled himself up to one knee and looked with his eyes first. 

All around him was nothing but destruction. Charred, collapsed, smouldering, and still-burning buildings stretched out as far as he could see through the smoke, ash, and dust, from his spot on the highest terrace of the palace courtyards. The bodies of his subjects were everywhere, and not one person from the Moon or the Silver Millennium, except for the troops Venus had loaned to Earth--

\--they'd killed each other, they'd all killed each other, and given the positioning of weapons, a number had killed themselves.

They'd burnt their own cities.

His hands sank into the ashy rubble, then further still into the dirt beneath, and he spread his senses outward. 

Nothing, nothing, nothing-- more death, more destruction, more rubble and fire-- and then something broke through the cold dread that was slowly freezing him in place:

Life. Life in reinforced cellars, life in buildings near the rivers, life in myriad pockets of temporary safety--! Mostly the very young and very old, closed up in spaces that couldn't be broken into easily, life in spaces that wouldn't burn--

And he realized that he'd never be able to get to all of them in time to save every last one, not on his own, not as one young man with only two hands, not even as magical Prince of this planet; he thought for a half second that Saturn had been right, that it would be more merciful for everyone to die in one moment of sweeping nothingness than to have people slowly suffocate or die of thirst or poisoned water or starvation before they could be pulled out, and others die even more slowly once rescued, with not enough food and very little clean water--

\--and abruptly Endymion yanked his hands out of the ground and turned to finally heave out the contents of his stomach, and keep heaving long past the point at which there was nothing left.

When he finally stopped, it was through exhaustion and will. He'd taken on the challenge. He wasn't ideal, but he was what this planet had, and it was his duty. Kunzite wouldn't let people die while he took time to throw up until he passed out. Nephrite wouldn't. Jadeite and Zoisite wouldn't. Neither would he.

He had no idea whether or not the other planets still lived, he had only the most vague of ideas how they functioned, but maybe-- maybe once he had a better idea of how to deal with the immediate problems, he could find out if they were healthier, if they could help, if they even would after what his people did to the Moon.

Firmly, he stuck his hands in the ground once more, and he pulled energy up from the ground with everything he had. Enough to direct more of it. Enough to speak to the Earth and beg her for help, enough to hope that his prayers would be heard. He sank his consciousness into the ground until he held only the most tenuous of connections to his own body -- only enough to come back to it when he grew too tired to be effective -- and he began to Move.

Unaware that he'd begun to glow like a small sun, Endymion convinced groundwater to well up around the cities, to gush out with tremendous force from wells and spew water into the air, to put out fires where it could reach and evaporate in the heat to linger in the atmosphere until it could rain down. He kept safe what pockets of life he could perceive, minding the direction of flow and the danger of weight and rapid erosion on shelters, directing the ground to shift so that landslides only happened in directions where no one was left alive and there were no remaining crops to save for hungry people.

Golden light poured from cracks in cellar walls; survivors heard rumbling above and then silence, and climbed from their havens with a sense of tentative hope mingled with their terror and mitigating their despair. Prayers were being answered. The gods were listening, finally. Older children, keeping younger ones safe and listening to grandmothers and grandfathers, edged out into the night-dark remains of the burning city with their clothes over their mouths and noses, and saw the miniature sun in front of the collapsed palace; they tumbled back in, crying, to tell of it and bring the others out.

On their way across the shattered city, they heard knocking and screaming for help from beneath rubble, and together, they pulled as many as they could from the piles, from the jammed and blocked cellar doors; golden light crept in and danced around rock and charred beams to make the task lighter wherever effort was being made--

One city. Another. Another. Images flooded Endymion's mind, and the Earth's inherent magic strained to meet his urgent prayers and directions, leapt to help him where it could, even though the planet shrieked in agony-- it knew he knew enough to begin to ease that pain, and that he could not fix it all at once, and that sometimes it had to endure a new pain to stop a greater one. It cooperated. He didn't need to shift it all himself. His attention, his awareness, was intense enough that the living planet woke enough to follow his lead, to finish erupting and collapse its volcanos, to shift tectonic plates enough to stifle them and stop pouring further death into the sky.

They found the glowing figure at the top of the terrace, too bright to look at, and gathered in exhausted silence and breathless wonder, elders and babies carried by children and teenagers, by all those whose response to unreasoning terror was to flee and hide instead of lashing out. When the figure collapsed and the glow dimmed, the crowd approached cautiously--

He'd forgotten to come back to his body, and the Earth had gently carried him back and tethered him to it once again. When the survivors reached him, they saw their prince motionless, a gaping and bloodied hole in his breastplate-- but one of the people unafraid to touch him called out to the rest that he still lived, and only slept.

 

****

###  **outside**

They watched from her mirror, watched as Saturn closed the Queen's eyes, and then saw her straighten up, and then Neptune put her mirror face down and none of them could see what was happening anymore. But that was all right, because it was going to end any moment, and they didn't need to see it coming.

Uranus gathered Neptune into her arms and closed her eyes, burying her face in the other woman's teal hair and breathing in the scent of oceans; Pluto stared into the endless sparkling sea of inky black space.

They all waited.

And waited.

Finally it was Pluto who glanced back at the other two Outer Senshi, frowning. Delicately, she asked, "Would you mind picking up your mirror again?"

Neptune lifted her head and Uranus let go a little bit and reached up to scrub at her eyes, and the three of them exchanged glances before Neptune did, in fact, lift her mirror once more.

Saturn was gone.

"...what?" breathed Neptune. "Where is she?" 

They all waited while the mirror's image shifted and swirled, and it finally zeroed in on Saturn's back, walking through clouds of ash and smoke, walking over rubble and broken ground and carefully skirting bodies strewn across the landscape, and then they saw her swing her glaive around--

\--they all flinched--

\--but the young girl vanished.

Uranus spoke for them all when she asked incredulously, "The fuck?"

 

****

###  **awake**

When he woke up, it was with cloth wadded underneath him, in a mostly-dark room that was relatively clear of ash and smoke. His armor had been taken off, and someone was holding water to his mouth in a dirty cup, supporting his head and shoulders with their arm.

"Kunzite--?" he mumbled after taking a sip and making a face; the water was dirty, and he'd have to see about that.

As the man shushed him quietly, Endymion remembered, and he squinted into the darkness. Not a man-- a boy a little younger than himself that he'd seen carrying a little girl around on his shoulders. Right: he worked in the stables. "Your sister--?" he croaked.

"She's fine," the boy said, and his eyes shone in gratitude. "Asleep. You saved us, Majesty. None of us-- none of us knew you could do anything like that..."

"Not me," Endymion said, mostly suppressing a flinch at the 'Majesty' instead of 'Highness'. "Earth. I prayed. She answered."

He started to shift to pick himself up, and the boy held on more tightly, shaking his head. "Keep resting."

Endymion looked more awake suddenly, incredulous expression growing on his face. "I can't. Let me up. How much time have I lost? There are all the other cities-- people in the countryside-- the whole world, Leandros-- Leandros, right?" He more insistently pushed himself up, and got a hand on the stone floor, and pulled; golden light welled up around it, fed into him as Leandros nodded uncertainly. "Our whole world was attacked by a demon it took the entire life of the Moon Kingdom to kill. This is not the only place I need to help."

"I thought it was the Moon Kingdom that did this to us," came another voice from the semidarkness, and a girl a little older than Leandros came closer, more visible in the light from Endymion's hand. Mneme, he remembered. An embroiderer. Her husband did something... he didn't remember. She was carrying an infant, rocking the baby steadily; her voice was muted, confused.

"Lies the demon was spreading through the woman Beryl. It had enough influence on the minds of our people that everyone-- they all just..." Endymion hauled himself to one knee, gestured vaguely in the direction of 'out there', and then picked himself up the rest of the way. "They did that to each other, to themselves, to us. That thing made us burn our own cities, kill our families, our neighbors and friends; it made us attack the Moon, which never did us harm. It was after our lives, after the life of our planet, after the power the Moon held-- and the Queen of the Moon spent all that power, and her life, to kill it and save us. Everyone... everyone up there died."

"You weren't... you didn't--"

"No, but you didn't either. This isn't-- it's not important right now. I have to get people out-- I have to set up, I don't know, people need water. You need fresh water. There's a spring I pulled up from beneath the Clarion, it's flooded a tunnel that had been sealed off, so it should be cleaner than anything else right now. Still, boil it before anyone drinks it. I'll be back."

"Are you going to Elysion?" There was an almost desperate hope in Mneme's face, in Leandros' eyes.

"Yes. I don't know what kind of shape it's in. But I'll be back, I promise. I can do more, for more people, from there. Maybe I can... I don't know. I have to see what it looks like," said Endymion carefully. "I promise you I'll return no later than tomorrow evening. Can I trust you two to make sure that water from that place is all people drink, for now, and that it's boiled? If you find food that's unspoilt, good; if it's questionable, set it aside. Not all of the structures are stable; try and keep anyone from climbing into anything or under anything."

"Yes, your Majesty," said Leandros, and Mneme simply nodded.

 

****

###  **unexpected**

"Not that I don't appreciate being alive," Pluto said slowly, stepping into the cavernous throne room of Titan Castle, "but..."

"What's the hold-up?" chirped Saturn's voice from a smaller room off of the enormous, dark, and frankly musty showroom that filled all the Goth of Destruction requirements. She poked her head out and then poked her glaive out, mock-threatening to raise it and grinning.

Pluto's hand was over her heart, and she concentrated on breathing normally. She'd never *met* the sparkly purple Senshi of Oh Shit before, and she was incredibly unnerved. Uranus and Neptune had sent her to talk with the newly awakened-- no, summoned-- Destroyer of Worlds because they figured Pluto's bailiwick was just as arcane and they might have something to chat about.

"Yes," she said after a second.

The young girl grinned even bigger, and gestured Pluto over. "I'll show you. How long's it been? A week? This is way better than being asleep, and way better than waking up just to die. I'm a fan of this guy. I know you three probably won't like him because he's not *them*, but I like him because he's big on Alternate Options."

Pluto stepped into the home of cognitive dissonance: after the castle, the reputation, the power, the *name*... and stopped short. There was so much pink mixed in with the purple, and so many... ruffles? There was something about it that pulled at her sideways, from an angle that shouldn't exist, and anyway it was probably just the decor whiplash. She looked to Saturn expectantly, and Saturn pointed her toward the mirror on her vanity, which-- ah. Not a mirror, a viewscreen, still functioning despite the destruction of the Moon. It ran, then, on Saturn's own power, like Charon Castle did hers.

She squinted into the screen. It showed the awful dusty ball of fire and ash that Earth had become, but... no fire. And part of it was darker than the particulate matter clogging the planet's atmosphere, and Pluto squinted further. "Is that... land? What am I looking at?"

"He's been busy," said Saturn happily. "He'll probably burn himself out, he's altogether too young to be pulling stunts like this, nevermind after so much loss, but like I told him, if anyone had a chance at salvaging something from this system, it was him."

Pluto looked blankly at Saturn. "Who are you talking about?"

Saturn waved her hand and went back to looking at the viewscreen, then moved some crystal controls and zeroed in on her target. It was a poor picture, taken via strange wavelengths through layers of atmospheric congestion, but it was moving. It showed the figure of a man in some kind of clothing that involved trousers, Pluto was pretty sure, and every two meters or so, he was stopping to drag glowing golden fingers through the soil. "The Senshi of Earth."

"Earth has a Senshi?" the tall woman asked, jerking back in shock and straightening up. "Where is she? Why did we not know about her before?"

"Because she's Prince-- no, King Endymion, who I gather was in love with the Moon. Aren't you supposed to be watching the Time Gate?"

"Guardian Pluto's got it for now."

"I wouldn't leave Guardian Saturn in charge of my shoelaces, nevermind all of time."

"That's because your shoelaces are taller than you are. Wait, our Princess' boyfriend was the Senshi of Earth?!"

Saturn just turned to look at Pluto, and her smile was small, and it threw cold water on the existential shock of 'Earth has a Senshi and it's a boy'. "Is. He asked for a chance to save it, I told you. I'd like the chance to live. I kind of wish I could help him. He's-- his Sailor Crystal. It's not like yours or mine. It's like Queen Serenity's, only it's not silver, it's gold. He could make this work. She did it without any help, but... she wasn't a baby. Endymion practically is. He's not even a year old yet."

Pause.

"One of my years," she amended. "I think he's seventeen or eighteen of his. I've been reading the archives Titan downloaded before the information stopped coming. He had guardians of his own, did you know that? And they were in love with the Inner Senshi. And everyone was on the moon and dead, and his power brought him back to life and he woke up in the middle of that, and he came and found me and *asked me to let him try*. So..."

Pluto crossed her arms over her stomach, suddenly cold. She saw the clouds clear behind Saturn for a second, and she saw the boy's face, the expression on it, as he turned around to look at the charred ground behind him. There was a faint dusting of a lighter color atop the charcoal, and she thought it might have been green. His face said it wasn't good enough, wasn't fast enough.

"So you couldn't not," she said softly, only mostly to Saturn. "I understand. I have to figure out how we can help him without leaving our posts. You can. You should."

"I think I will."


	3. Help

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Content warning:** Suicide flashback

Endymion walked out past the ruined and sodden city walls, walls they as a people, as a planet, had hoped they were past needing. Given how scorched the buildings closest-- whose own stone had melted, whose metal had slagged-- the city walls were something that hurt more than they helped, in the end. Instead of blocking it all out, they'd contained the violence, the fire, the people trying to escape... the heat, and the close spaces made the heat intensify.

There was nothing in his stomach, and he was glad.

He walked past the cratered south road into the city, headed for the mountain pass that held the closest physical gateway to Elysion. With the way he'd sealed it, he couldn't get in by dreaming himself there, and teleporting took too much out of him without help from his Shitennou. He was relieved-- and Nephrite would even now be giving him shit over it if he were here-- that there were no horses he might have to ride; his feet would more than suffice. When he got there, undoing the seal should be academic.

On the way, though, his boots sank into the bloodied and cracked-dry and drowning remains of vast fields. The charred stumps of thick stalks jutted up and tore at the soft leather sides, and the foul mud seeped inside, soaking his woolen hose which immediately starting to chafe against his skin. "Yes, Nephrite, I *am* sucking it up," he muttered to the air, "I *know* I've dealt with worse, and I *know* I'll just fix it later. That doesn't make it *comfortable*..."

He let out a shaky breath, and then crouched down and trailed his fingers in the mud. No one alive to pull out of anything. Nothing alive below the scorched earth--

\--wait, no. There was. There was fire below the surface over that way, and there were burrowing animals over this way, and all around...

...all around, there were seeds. There was grain, there were *seeds*-- oh he'd forgotten, he'd *forgotten*, these were so many stumps not because everything had burned, but because the harvest had already come in. So much had happened, and then so much was so broken when he came back, that he'd forgotten-- it's not like he could see the sky, anyway, or tell by the leaves on sight, or any number of other--

Again he shook his head. *Focus,* he could almost hear Zoisite's amused voice telling him, and he did as he was told. The smoke still hung heavy in the atmosphere, and he'd need to do something about the underground fire over there first. But then, then, he could walk his way across the fields and make sure that the seeds stayed where they were, and hope that the winter might not be too cold.

His hand went flat against the hard part of the ground under the bloody mud, the part that was baked hard, and he pushed out with his mind to break open the shell of earth and let the inferno loose. It exploded with an underwhelming noise that sucked all the air in and shook the ground, and then lit it on fire all at once. Then Endymion pulled water up again to begin seeping into the edges of the compressed--

\--the compressed--

oh.

That had been-- he saw at the edges of the fire where the bones hadn't liquified from the heat, he saw the shape of the bones, and then he saw the shape of the other bones mixed in, and something shut down more inside him. Grimly, he continued pulling at the water. He'd let it saturate the ground around the collapsed buildings and flood into them, turning into steam until it didn't anymore, and he'd let-- he'd let time take care of the rest, and keep the knowledge in his heart with all the rest that it was only bones, it wasn't people anymore, and there was no one to object to them being buried with pigs.

He pulled his consciousness back, and as he opened his eyes, he saw greenery sprouting around him in a spreading circle.

"Well," he said to himself, then stopped. _Id est quod est._ Either they'd grow enough to be useful before the winter came and the people left in this city would have food, or he'd ruined next year's crop.

He kept walking, and periodically bent to drag his hands through the mud. In for a penny.

But Elysion. Elysion might be all right, still.

\-----

He didn't expect to be greeted with swordpoints when he opened the heavy magical seal his blood had put in place.

\-----

Saturn teleported down to Earth on her own -- one of the few perks of being the Senshi of Destruction was that she could show up anywhere she was supposed to nuke, even if she'd decided not to nuke it for the time being. She appeared where she'd seen Endymion last, then followed the trail of spreading greenery through the clouds of smoke-polluted air. He had so much work to do, and he couldn't just revive the planet, like Queen Serenity had made the other planets livable on her own. He had to keep his subjects alive and working together. Much more work.

As she meandered in his wake, the girl thought about what she _could_ do to help. She wasn't nearly as personable or charismatic as the new King of Earth, so she couldn't help him organize and motivate his people. Plus she was clearly a Senshi, and a couple of days ago, that had been a dangerous thing to be on Earth. So she'd have to get a disguise no matter what. 

She also couldn't... help him revive the planet itself, could she? Her powers weren't based in life and creation, they were based in death and destruction--

\--no! No, death and rebirth. She didn't remember the last time she'd had to destroy everything; she ended herself along with everything else whenever she was called to awaken. She only knew that it had happened before. But she knew down to the toes of her impressive boots that rebirth was definitely a part of it, and that maybe she'd get to have the rebirth part without the death part this time. The longer she was alive and awake, the more she wanted to stay that way. Now all she had to do was figure out how to regenerate a phoenix before setting it on fire first.

She finally saw Endymion ahead of her, looking at a rock wall and gesticulating with his whole body, telegraphing fury.

Not a good sign. If he was already going crazy she'd probably have to destroy everything anyway.

As she got closer, she could hear him. He was shouting something about cowardly entitled greedy selfish snobs and the health of the population and the planet-- ooh, and there were a lot of 'you's involved, which meant he was yelling at people directly. Maybe they were invisible. Was that something Terrans could do? But there wasn't enough room between him and the sheer rock face to cram a crowd of people into. 

Operating on the assumption that there must, therefore, be an invisible _window_ in the wall instead, as she got closer she moved to the side and put her back against the wall, edging toward him sideways. He glanced in her direction and went pale without missing a beat. 

"So pack up your things. I'm not actually a dick, so you get half an hour and then I'm coming in there whether or not you decide you want to commit regicide. Please note: if you try, I won't die and you'll be on the worst shitlist possible, so I recommend against the idea."

Endymion took a half step back and made a gesture like he was moving a door, then slammed it with a resounding BOOM up and down the mountain pass, echoing up the cliffs.

So not an invisible window, then, but an invisible door. Good to know.

He stood there for a moment, staring at nothing, then dug his pocketwatch out of his jacket and wound it. Even if it didn't have the right time, it could at least count minutes. Then he turned to face Saturn, face drawn. "Unless I've already failed and that's why you're here."

Saturn clasped her hands behind her back, her glaive vanishing into the aether. She shook her head. "I'm here to help. You technically don't need it, which is why I can offer? Sort of? Or I might be making that up to justify everyth-- whatever, I'm here to help." She glanced around him at the sheer rock wall where he'd slammed the invisible door, and gave him a curious look that had no business being as adorable as it was. "Who were you talking to? I saw you waving your arms around, then heard you yelling, both at nothing, before I could hear what you were actually _saying_ , and I was just-- I was thinking you were already out of your tree and I was very discouraged."

Endymion really wasn't sure how to take this. He wondered idly if he was dreaming. If he were, it'd be a lot better than he expected. "Uh--" he said, then glanced back over his shoulder for a second, then looked back at her with a sigh. "Oh, fuck it. That's one of the physical gateways to Elysion, which is where most of our planet's magic is from. It's... it's a whole realm. It's where our version of the Moon's prayer tower exists, and it's the heart of Earth--"

He trailed off because Saturn had stepped up and put one small, delicately gloved hand against his chest, right where his tunic jacket was stained with his own heart's blood and Serenity's commingled. 

He shut his mouth.

He cleared his throat.

Saturn looked up, a crookedly wry smile on her pale oval of a face. "No, right here is the heart of Earth." She patted his chest over his heart, then let her hand drop and stepped back. "I was right. Anyway! Sorry. Do go on."

"...okay," said Endymion, looking at Saturn a little sidelong, not really liking the feeling of having completely lost control of the conversation, and offbalance for it. "I sealed the gates before I went to the Moon because I didn't want the hysteria to spread _there_. Whoever managed to get in before I sealed them can't get out, and no one can get in, and I'm the only one who can un-seal them. The--" his voice got really loud for a second as he half-turned to yell toward the door, "--CRAVEN AND TRAITOROUS ABSOLUTE FUCKNOZZLE DOORKNOBS WHO'RE IN THERE--" and he turned back to face Saturn again, arms crossed tightly and knuckles white where he gripped his pocketwatch, "don't want me to unseal them. I'm sure you can guess why. That means everybody out of the pool until the outside of the Earth is fixed."

"Sounds reasonable," said Saturn, looking past Endymion again and frowning for a second, then looking back to him brightly. "Anyway I brought your sword, I guess you couldn't find it when you left the Moon. Smart move not to waste time looking for it, by the way, if you'd been a minute later I would already have raised the Glaive." She turned and drew said Glaive out of her subspace pocket, which looked-- strange-- and then held it aside as she drew Endymion's sword out afterwards. She held it out. "I cleaned it off for you. I guess you were dead at the time; that excuses you from lectures about not cleaning your blade. So tell me-- what can I do to help?"

Still unsure of this turn of events, and of the Senshi of Silence, and of her gregarious demeanor and her ability to walk in those boots across that field, Endymion started to answer as he reached for his sword. "Uh, thanks. I don't know, what _can_ you do? Are you any good with transpor--"

The second he touched the hilt, Endymion suddenly looked like he'd been punched in the gut with a spike, and dropped the sword from an abruptly nerveless hand. He fell to his knees and clutched at his abdomen, eyes wide and unseeing.

"Oh shit," Saturn breathed, then scrambled over to-- to-- fuss, essentially, since she wasn't particularly versed in anything medical or psychological or at all related to comforting anyone having some kind of fit, which is what the young King looked like he was doing. He was rigid in her arms and breathing shallowly, and again, she didn't take this as a sign well-disposed toward her survival. "Endymion! King! Prince! Hey! You're not bleeding, it would be getting on me if you were--! Wake up!"

He started shivering violently and shut his eyes, making a small high sound in the back of his throat that raised the small hairs on the back of Saturn's neck. He kept clutching at his belly-- 

"Endymion!" she said in a much firmer voice, putting into it a little of the power that she'd spoken with when he begged her for Earth's life. She glanced down at the ground, where his pocketwatch had fallen, and saw the time passed. "You don't have time to break down now, in fifteen minutes you have to go in, flip tables, and kick a bunch of people out of paradise. Snap out of it!"

He still couldn't focus on her, so she bit him.

\-----

The world was ending and Beryl had stabbed Endymion to get at her, and for a half second, not even aware of the scream ripping itself out of her throat, Serenity stared at the body of her love-- no, her-- her-- she'd never found a word to truly encompass her prince, and now she never would. Her heart was frozen and her blood was ice in her veins and the sounds and smells of the battle around her, even her awareness of her guardians fighting her Endymion's guardians and legions of mad Terrans, all dimmed out to nothing and all she could see was his beautiful face, the spreading pool of blood, and then-- and then Jadeite standing in front of Beryl before the witch could get at her or her prince's still form, and getting mown down. 

That was what finally moved her to action. She didn't want to live in a world where this was real. She didn't want to survive when no one else did. She didn't want to exist without Endymion. And besides, if she were dead, maybe this would all stop. Maybe her girls could take their surviving counterparts away from here and they could be all right-- maybe-- maybe it would be okay for someone. We all tell ourselves stories, and Serenity was no exception.

Her small white hands found Endymion's bastard sword where it had clattered away from his hand, and it was so big she couldn't properly hold the hilt and get the point of it anywhere near herself. In a singleminded, frustrated daze, she braced the hilt against the broken tiles of the courtyard and held the flat of the blade between her hands, then fell--

"Endymion," said Kunzite, his deep voice sounding more commanding toward his prince than it had in years. "Endymion, you don't have time to break down now--"

Other words were happening, and those other words were in a higher, younger-sounding voice, but Kunzite kept speaking. "And you're not Serenity, my Prince. This is the past, and it's not your experience you're reliving. Remember your training. Don't let the vision rule you; it is either a tool or unwelcome but potentially useful information. It is not your life, your memory. Wake up."

"Wake up."

"Wake up."

"Snap out of it!"

There was a sudden sharp pain in Endymion's forearm, and he suddenly focused on Saturn and yelped, clapping his hand to the injury and looking outraged. "You BIT me!"

"You're welcome. What the hell happened to you? Where did you just go? Do I need to worry about it happening again?" asked Saturn, picking herself up and dusting herself off, then scooping up her glaive and putting it back away. 

Endymion's mouth opened, then shut, and he closed his eyes and sighed as he healed his arm. "Psychometry. If you don't want it happening again, don't go fishing for whatever swords killed the Shitennou or my parents and then handing them to me."

Saturn's face changed. She clearly remembered exactly where she'd gotten Endymion's sword from. She glanced away. "Right. Okay. You were saying something about transportation?"

Endymion filed away the fact that Serenity had killed herself because he'd died protecting her, indefinitely postponed thinking about it, and hauled himself up again. He gingerly picked up his sword and sheathed it. He wouldn't use it again, but he couldn't leave it. "Help me figure out how to get groups of something like three to five hundred people long distances relatively quickly when the roads are broken, horses are dead, and people are hungry. Logistics. I need logistics help. Right now I also need help... what was it, flipping tables and kicking people out of paradise?"

Saturn half-turned her head and smiled at him tentatively. "You need help being the bad guy? I can _see_ that. And it's something I'm pretty good at."

"Excellent," said Endymion, trying to smile at her, but it didn't quite work.

She wouldn't hold it against him.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm basically posting a first draft, sorry. To be more clear: this is unedited, unbetaed, and full of minor continuity errors where I forgot I wrote something or wrote something out of chronological order and didn't bother to reread, because yolo


End file.
